Partnerships for Women's Health - Striving for Best Practice within the UN Global Compact

Every minute, at least one woman dies from pregnancy and childbirth complications; a further twenty suffer injury, infection or disease. Despite medical advances, and years of national and international policy declarations, this tragic situation remains particularly severe in developing countries, violating a fundamental human right.

This book draws together insights and experiences of development practitioners, policy-makers, academic experts and private sector partners to describe the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI). A public private partnership based in India, the WHI took a new approach to solving the apparently intractable problem of poor women’s health.

Informed by the growing literature on public private partnerships, the observations and analyses in this volume describe how the WHI drew reference from both the Millennium Development Goals and the United Nations Global Compact to implement a project that would make a real difference in women’s lives, simultaneous with meeting private sector commercial imperatives.

By opening the project to independent transnational assessment the WHI articulated new standards for best practice in public private partnerships, including with reference to such issues as communications, objective-setting, ongoing partnership management and real health outcomes. In line with the WHI’s ambition to grow and become transferable to other contexts, these standards can inform and shape more effective public private partnerships in the future.

Table of contents

Foreword: Mary Robinson

Introduction: Women’s health through PPP within the UN Global Compact – At the nexus of business, ethics and human rights, Martina Timmermann

PART A: CONTEXTUAL FRAME OF REFERENCE

Section I: MDGs, human rights, the UN Global Compact and public private partnerships

• Improving maternal health in Asia and Africa: Challenges and opportunities, Moazzam Ali
• Poverty, health and the human right to the highest attainable standard of health, Paul Hunt and Judith Bueno de Mesquita
• Partnering in support of the right to health: What role for business? Klaus M. Leisinger
• The challenge of equal financial access to the best available health care: Bringing in the private sector, Günter Neubauer and Iris J. Driessle
• The United Nations Global Compact: Seeking to embrace diversity, Monika Kruesmann
• Small and medium-sized enterprises: Their role in achieving the Millennium Development Goals, Kai Bethke and Manuela Bösendorfer

Section II: Women’s health needs and health care in India

• The health situation of women in India: Policies and programmes , Suneeta Mittal and Arvind Mathur
• India’s medical system, Nirmal Kumar Ganguly and Malabika Roy
• Health PPPs in India: Stepping stones for improving women’s reproductive health care? Rama V. Baru and Madhurima Nundy
• Pro-poor capacity-building in India’s women’s health sector , Arabinda Ghosh

PART B: A CASE STUDY IN INDIA

• Introduction to the case study: The Women’s Health Initiative – A trilateral partnership within the framework of the UN Global Compact , Martina Timmermann
• KARL STORZ’s WHI goals and expectations, Sybill Storz
• The German PPP Programme: A viable way to improve women’s health in India? Nicolaus von der Goltz
• GTZ’s goals and expectations for the WHI public private partnership from a development cooperation point of view, Diana Kraft and Jörg Hartmann
• The WHI: Management perspectives from the private and the public partners in the field, Peter Laser and Anu Chopra
• The WHI: Perspectives from private and public medical doctors in the Endoscopy Training Centres, A. Kurian Joseph and Alka Kriplani
• The economic logic of the Women’s Health Initiative as a business model for poverty alleviation, Christina Gradl
• A PPP for women’s health and human rights in India: Striving for best practice within the framework of the UN Global Compact, Martina Timmermann and Monika Kruesmann